Tuesday, October 13, 2020

A Metastasizing Hatred

Our society seems to sink further into hatred, division and coarseness every day. It's as though bitterness and bile are metastasizing throughout our culture like a virulent cancer.

Here's an example: Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett said in her opening statement at her Senate confirmation hearing that,
[C]ourts are not designed to solve every problem or right every wrong in our public life. The policy decisions and value judgments of government must be made by the political branches elected by and accountable to the People. The public should not expect courts to do so, and courts should not try.
This has enraged the left that a Supreme Court nominee should think it her responsibility to follow the Constitution and not to usurp the role of the legislature by making law.

One sweet individual responded to Coney's statement with this, "this is probably the one and only time i want misogyny to do it's thing and let this woman f***ing fail."

I doubt if this person limits his or her misogynistic wishes just to Ms. Barrett. Doubtless, any conservative woman would be the object of similar vituperation.

And there are worse examples.

Late last month ex-CEO of Twitter Dick Costello said in a tweet that “Me-first capitalists who think you can separate society from business are going to be the first people lined up against the wall and shot in the revolution. I’ll happily provide video commentary.”

It sounds less like a simple prophecy than an enthusiastic endorsement of the prospect.

One of the premier haters in the media is a man named Keith Olbermann. Olbermann has been a pundit on MSNBC and ESPN and has recently hosted a YouTube show dedicated to defeating Donald Trump.

Olbermann recently delivered himself of this rant:
If Trump has triggered hate, as Olbermann alleges, it's a hatred primarily manifested among those who oppose him, not those who support him. Olbermann himself is exhibit A.

Mr. Olbermann chose not to specify the crimes Trump and his supporters "must" be prosecuted for. His listing of offenders (Mike Lee? William Barr? Amy Coney Barrett? Mike Pence?) sounds like nothing so much as the ravings of a lunatic driven over the edge of sanity by an irrational and perverse obsession.

"The fight," Mr Olbermann avers in his best Inspector Dreyfus impersonation (see below), "is not just to win the election, but to win it by enough to chase — at least for a moment — Trump and the maggots [Trump's supporters] off the stage and then try to clean up what they left."

It's hard to say what mess Trump has created, but then haters rarely get into specifics. They believe that emotional hysteria suffices to convince their audience that their point has been made. Who needs to present facts when visceral loathing and name-calling can be mustered instead?

President Trump's opponents sometimes say that our nation can't survive four more years of Trump. Maybe what they mean is that they themselves can't survive four more years. Four years is a long time to endure the debilitating sickness of the soul such as seems to afflict at least some of our friends on the contemporary left.